Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism

Festive stages

Tourism, the world’s largest industry, despite derision and sleaze, is ever more important in global cultural life. All of us are tourists now and then, reluctantly or eagerly visiting the exotic, consuming the foreign, watching the great universal show.. The past is particularly important for tourism: jet travel since about 1960 has become a form of time travel, allowing us glimpses of lost worlds, making us into historians of heritage and connoisseurs of the alien. Though tourists buy physical objects like souvenirs and clothing and great quantities of food and drink, as they once converted wild beasts into travel trophies, what they are actually after is immaterial. Tourists are modernity’s paradoxical consumers who seek not merchandise but experience; the attractions of the world draw them with promises of sensation or renewal, inspiration or plain diversion. Experience is hard to commodify. Visits can be structured as in safaris and cruises, but the touristic site is only the occasion for the adventure: seeing the Acropolis, touching its stones, is ultimately a prompt for an event that occurs in the mind of the visitor, as the meaning of a performance occurs in the mind of the spectator.

This is why, as the sociologist Erik Cohen notes, “tourism is a fuzzy concept”; his best definition emphasizes that tourists are people who travel “in the expectation of pleasure from the novelty and change experienced” while away from the everyday rule of their lives. ¹ Touristic experience takes many forms, from the purely spectatorial or voyeuristic to hard work like shoveling manure on a dude ranch, but is usually characterized by its extraordinary dimension, temporal limitation, and the absence of responsibility—in other words, by the carnivalesque. To be a tourist is above all to be a willing stranger. It’s an alienation we rush after. The World Tourist Organization calculates that between 1950 and 1990 tourist arrivals rose from 25 million to 456 million per annum, an eighteen-fold increase, and the number is expected to double again by the year 2010 to 937 million arrivals ² —about one-sixth of the world’s population touring every year.

Cultural tourism, a form of recreation in which travelers spend significant leisure time and money on cultural activity, became important in modern Europe with the rise of the Grand Tour at the end of the seventeenth century. ³ Despite its widening to the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth, the Grand Tour was the property of an elite, like most high culture. A few astute entrepreneurs conceived dramatic festivals with high art appeal that demanded travel, as the master showman Max Reinhardt did with the Salzburg Festival in 1917. The model for modern cultural festivals was established as early as 1876 in a small town in Bavaria by the great tourist agent Richard Wagner, who with the help of the king of that small state created the Bayreuth Festspeilhaus as the first theatre in the world dedicated to the work of a single artist, who happened to be himself, and invited us to drop in for a visit. Like the restored Olympics at the turn of the century, the arts festivals laid claim to a connection with the quasi-religious festivals of ancient Greece, which for the theatre were idealized as arenas of political, social, and spiritual integration. Two issues were crucial. First, performances in twentieth-century festivals tended to be placed in unusual designed or found spaces modelled on the circle that encouraged a sense of togetherness among spectators. Many modernist theatre directors believed that a renovated approach to performance could be achieved by returning to the ancient festival ideal of an enveloping audience, and Shakespeare was central to this movement from Jocza Savits in Munich to William Poel and Granville Barker in London to Tyrone Guthrie in Ontario.

Second, the location of the festivals and their calendar limitations meant that a large portion of the audiences had to travel to reach them, encouraging a sense of pilgrimage to a sacred locale. This had been true at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus since its founding, but the great expansion of arts festivals did not occur until...